NASA World Wind Java – Nightly builds available

Fresh news from Tom Gaskins lead developer of World Wind Java, a nightly build server has been made available to the public, he also explains why SVN is not currently viable for the project.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s been difficult to find time to get the code into a solid release state and do a formal release. Our sponsors keep our small team very busy developing new features. To relieve your frustration and ours, we’re making the daily development code available. We don’t consider this a release, just a code drop so that you can be fully up-to-date with ongoing development.

Patrick will soon post a summary of features we believe are new since the 0.5 release and refresh.

What remains to make a 1.0? Final definition and clean-up of the API, both the public and the protected interfaces, documentation, and resolution of important issues that users have identified in our bug tracker and on the forum. We do intend a 1.0, but don’t know a delivery date yet.

Some will ask why we don’t put the code under source control on SourceForge or somewhere else. The reason is that our sponsors rely on the consistency and correct operation of the daily code and want zero possibility of unauthorized modification, and we are required to minimize the possibility that code that is not supposed to be made public remains out of the public releases. The system we’re announcing today is the best compromise among public and internal needs. (There are likely people reading this who want to argue the point, but please don’t. We’re doing all that we are able.)

Thanks for your continued support and for all the great apps you’re developing. Interest in WWJ is the strongest it’s ever been, and is clearly increasing.

Patrick Murris has also made a list of the changes since the 0.5 release.

– On hold
– Fog layer produces artifacts with the new tiled image layer premultiplied alpha blending and has been removed
– Remote surface images are being reworked into a more generic scheme

This is a big step forward for World Wind Java and will hopefully encourage more community interaction and contributions, there may be more breaking news from NASA before too long, but I can’t even give you a hint about that yet, so stay tuned.